Bob Cesca: The Reality of Secession and Unicorns
I hate to disappoint the 675,000 whiny diaper babies calling for secession in the wake of the election but, sorry, no matter how hard they stomp their feet and pout and fling their feces at the electoral map, demands for secession might as well be demands for goblins and unicorns. They're equally as realistic.
Secession from the United States will never happen.
Ever.
Not only is it illegal, but it's technically an act of treason as defined by the Constitution, and it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White. Furthermore, the secessionists aren't merely condemning the Obama administration, secession is by definition a categorical rejection of the United States and its Constitution, say nothing of the beloved Pledge of Allegiance, which specifically includes the word "indivisible" right after the word "God." I thought these things were sacrosanct to conservatives.
I'm not breaking any news here, but the red states tried this already and it failed miserably. The core motivation behind the 1861 secession movement was, of course, the defense of slavery as the cornerstone of the Southern economy, and, subsequently, state sovereignty over the legality and regulation of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, secessionist fire-eaters were convinced that the initially unconvinced Abraham Lincoln would summarily free the slaves and possibly arm them for an insurrection against their masters, thus undermining the southern economy in a massive display of executive "tyranny." And so the southern states, one by one, seceded. In the four years that followed, 2.5 percent of the American population was wiped out in the American Civil War -- the equivalent to 7,850,000 people in terms of today's population, or roughly the entire 2010 population of Virginia. And, in the end, the decimated seceding states were forced by military attrition to return to the Union.
But let's say for the sake of argument that all of the former Confederate states defied the astronomical one-in-a-million odds and actually seceded again. (I can't help but to think about Jim Carrey's reaction in Dumb and Dumber when presented with one-in-a-million odds: "So you're saying there's a chance..."
What would actually happen?
Continues: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/secession-obama-2012_b_2138541.html